Changing works from the Tate Collection
Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation
This exhibition highlighted the distinctive geometric theme in David Nash’s work. Drawing on the geometric strand in the artist’s dramatic wood sculptures, the exhibition was designed to create a dynamic interaction between the works and the architecture of the gallery. The inorganic, non-allusive sculptures that Nash makes using unseasoned wood are based on the universal geometry of the column, cube, the sphere and the pyramid. The exhibition included eight major sculptures and premiered the film Boulder, by Pete Telfer, which includes documentary footage of one of Nash's most significant works of land art Wooden Boulder, begun in 1978. The artist also made a print for the St Ives Print Series.
Artists on Artists presented David Nash’s choice from the Tate Collection. The display brought together three significant works by Alberto Giacometti made in the 1950s. Nash considers Giacometti along with Constantin Brancusi, to be one of the first sculptors to consciously work with space as a ‘positive active presence and not as a neutral emptiness’.
London-based artist Mike Marshall uses landscape as a backdrop to explore aspects of the human condition. By highlighting moments of daily life which are often overlooked or considered banal, his videos and sound installations offered subtle and witty interventions in the gallery spaces. One of the works The Sound of Bombay combined the ambient noises of a Mumbai Art Gallery Café Terrace with that of the café at St Ives, offering a portal to another time and place.
Mariele Neudecker is internationally renowned for her atmospheric representations of landscapes. Using sculpture, video and photography, Neudecker’s work challenges the psychological transitions we make between observing the real world and how we picture it.
Over and Over, Again and Again brought together a group of works exploring historical cultural images of the sublime landscape. Drawing her visual material from icons of the German Romantic period such as Caspar David Friedrich, Franz Schubert and Arnold Böcklin, the viewer was given on a journey into the imagination using landscape as the vehicle. The exhibition toured to Tate Britain.
This project was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Gwyn Hanssen Pigott is one of Australia's most well known and respected ceramic artists, renowned for the abstract simplicity of her off-white porcelain pots. Throughout her career, Hansen Pigott has worked with many significant potters, including Bernard Leach. Motivated by the Leach philosophy, the modernist forms of Hans Coper and the still-life paintings of Georgio Morandi, she has evolved 'inseparable' groups of translucent porcelain forms. The exhibition toured to the Crafts Study Centre at Surrey Institute Farnham and Ruthin Craft Centre Gallery.
Changing works from the Tate Collection
Trevor Bell returned to Cornwall in the 1990s from the United States. His work explores the way the experience of colour and space in painting parallels the experience in landscape. Although his work does not contain obvious landscape references, it retains a strong sense of space and atmosphere, emphasised by his use of dramatically shaped canvases. His exhibition at Tate St Ives included pieces from the 1960s and 70s and a newly commissioned series, which marked a new departure in his work since returning to the South West.
Where possible the lead artist on display at Tate St Ives is invited to choose works from the Tate Collection that have inspired them. Trevor Bell selected an eclectic but very popular range of works, which included works by JMW Turner, Giorgio Morandi, Josef Beuys, Stubbs and Anish Kapoor.
The landscape created through the excavation of clay by Imerys, producers of English China Clay in St Austell, has a mysterious and surreal beauty. Jem Southam was commissioned by Tate St Ives to make a series of large-scale photographs that capture the shifting histories of this industrial terrain with the 10 x 8-plate camera.
Toby Paterson works in a number of forms from large-scale wall paintings to smaller paintings on Perspex. His work is informed by post-war architecture, often inspired by his own skateboarding journeys. Responding to Victor Pasmore and Ben Nicholson works in the Tate Collection, Paterson created two site-specific pieces around the gallery, one of which remains in the Café. A commissioned print marked the popularity of this café wall painting.
Bernard Leach travelled to St Ives from Japan with fellow potter Shoji Hamada in 1920 to set up the Leach Pottery, which became one of the most celebrated potteries in Britain. This display highlighted a selection of works by key figures in the story of the Leach Pottery. The ceramics were selected from the collections of George and Cornelia Wingfield-Digby, and Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, and curated by Emmanuel Cooper.
Works from the Tate Collection with early works by Barns-Graham and Denis Mitchell
This memorial exhibition celebrated key moments in the life and work of the foremost British abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. The exhibition drew from her 60 year career, revealing the development of her ideas and visual language. As one of the young ‘moderns’ working in St Ives in 1940, she began exploring the possibilities of painting beyond representation, her images deriving from acute observations of natural forms and sense of place. Paintings and drawings revealled a psychological response to her experience of the landscape with the direct application of paint, muted palette and flattening of forms.
Sculptor Denis Mitchell was a significant figure working within the modernist artist community of St Ives. He became best known for his sleek, abstracted single forms in carved bronze, inspired by his intimate knowledge of working in and on the Cornish landscape. Displaying a range of Mitchell's keynote polished bronzes from the 1960s and 70s, his work complemented Tate St Ives's exhibition of paintings by his close friend colleague Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.
This exhibition focused on major gallery pieces from a career covering nearly 70 years of working with clay. It highlights the simplicity and strength of Bernard Leach's understanding of form and his awareness of inner and outer space, as well as his highly accomplished decoration. Come to the Edge traces Leach’s changing concerns and sheds fresh light on the work that confirms him as a major twentieth-century artist.
This was the first exhibition of Callum Innes's paintings in the South West, and presented a dynamic range of works from his distinctive Exposed Painting series which were commissioned for Tate St Ives. Born in 1962 in Edinburgh, Callum Innes, like Wilkelmina Barns-Graham, studied at Edinburgh College of Art and currently teaches in the School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. Innes belongs to a generation of British artists who continue to explore the possibilities of paint on canvas, using the language of the monochrome, an established format of abstract painting since the 1960s. His paintings are created through a process of addition and subtraction; sometimes he eliminates areas of paint from the surface grid to leave a faint trace, a technique which injects a dynamic lyricism into an otherwise architecturally 'still' painting. Innes made a special etching to contribute to the St Ives Print Series.
Changing works from the Tate Collection
Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation, Tate Members and Tate St Ives Members
Richard Deacon is widely regarded as one of the principal British sculptors, best known for his innovative use of open form and his interest in materials and their manipulation. Exhibiting in Cornwall for the first time, Deacon created a dramatic installation for Tate St Ives with several previously unseen works and a new commission. Born in Bangor, North Wales in 1949, for more than two decades Deacon has created unique sculptures in a wide variety of materials such as laminated wood, polycarbonate, leather, cloth, ceramic and stainless steel. Working on both a domestic and monumental scale, his structures combine organic and biomorphic forms with elements of engineering. The sculptures defined by the space within and around them and as much as by their shape, had a vivacious presence in the unique architecture of Tate St Ives. Deacon also made a new print for the St Ives Print Series.
Supported by Tate Members and Tate St Ives Members
German-born painter Paul Feiler has been consistently concerned with the architecture of space and the ambiguity of our visual experiences. From the early 1950s, when he became known for his gestural abstractions inspired by the structures of nature, to his recent meticulously ordered canvases expressing shrine-like portals, Feiler’s paintings are sensitive arrangements of form, space, tone and light which naturally progress to simplification. Originally associated with the post-war Modernists in St Ives, by 1953 Feiler had moved permanently to the outskirts of Newlyn, Cornwall, where he still resides. This exhibition whilst in dialogue with the spatial dynamics of Deacon’s wood, metal and ceramic forms, explored the evolution of his ideas from the raw energy of early works to the meditative restraint he displayed after 1969. The paintings were drawn from six decades of Feiler’s career, 1953 to 2004.
This bold display presented powerful works from the Tate Collection selected by the artist Paul Feiler. Including works by Henri Matisse, Kasimir Malevich, Georges Braques and Paul Cézanne, Artists on Artists complemented the Paul Feiler exhibition, and delighted many of the visitors to the gallery.
Changing works from the Tate Collection
The English draughtsman, photographer and filmmaker Tacita Dean is best known for her compelling 16mm films. Her works investigate notions of time, memory and nautical elements, playing with the blurred identities of mysterious people or things. This was the first major public gallery presentation of Dean's work since her exhibition at Tate Britain in 2001. Since her move to Berlin in 2000, Dean has been unpicking the cultural fabric of this city under going rapid change and the show evoked the sights and sounds of Dean’s experiences through films, photographs, sound works and found ephemera. A new work entitled Die Regimentstochter was premiered. Dean trained at both Falmouth College of Arts and the Slade School of Fine Art and her enduring connection with Cornwall can be seen in several of her works.
The ceramist Simon Carroll undertook a new commission for Tate St Ives. Born in 1964, Carroll has become well known for his exuberant, often-challenging ceramic vessels. Operating in the realms of art informel and uniquely expressive, his pots deconstruct the history of ceramics – particularly nineteenth-century English slipware – whilst drawing inspiration from an eclectic range of sources, including Elizabethan ruffles, sombreros and Cornish wind farms. Although not so well known, Carroll has exhibited nationally and internationally, is a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and is represented in both the V&A and Crafts Council collections. The exhibition toured to five further venues across the UK.
Kerstin Kartscher was the third artist to participate in the Tate St Ives Artists's Residency Programme, based at the historic Porthmeor Studios in St Ives. During the twelve-month residency and whilst participating in several international projects including winning the Overbeck Prize in Lübeck, Kartscher developed a new body of work for this special exhibition. Born in Nuremberg in 1966, her work portrays new fantasy worlds for contemporary women. Free of social, emotional and psychological constraints, Kartscher's women celebrate their femininity within fantastical, elegant and immense landscapes.
Shown at Tate St Ives for the first time, this new acquisition to Tate, Twenty Six (Drawing and Falling Things) 2001, is part of a video series from British artists John Wood and Paul Harrison. Since 1993, Wood and Harrison have created works that are built around performed actions, absurd dramas featuring themselves interacting with props in simple constructed spaces. The works are almost invariably short, each piece a variation upon, or development of, the initial idea. The theme of irresistible forces acting on the body – a poetic ode to the necessity of accepting the lack of power over forces such as gravity and mortality – runs through their work.
Changing works from the Tate Collection
The American artist Ellsworth Kelly is much admired in Britain but his work is very rarely seen. Kelly explores the power of abstract form through meticulous geometry, taking the elusiveness of forms that we glimpse as part of our lives, fragments of the seen world – such as plant forms or shadows falling onto a flight of steps – and manipulating such forms to create monumental visual statements, illusions of space and colour. This exhibition brought together special loans with Tate Collection works. A selected group of plant lithographs from the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, showing Kelly’s fascination with form in nature and the potential of line complemented the dynamic canvases in the sea-facing gallery.
Born in Japan in 1954, now living and working in Fife on the Scottish coast, artist Keiko Mukaide's work evolves not only from an aesthetic response to landscape, but through a fascination with both its histories and natural rhythms. In her commission for the 55-foot-long, sea-facing showcase at Tate St Ives, the artist created an installation of brilliant coloured light using shards of dichroic glass, centrally lit by a beehive lighthouse lens that engaged with ideas in both Turner and Kelly’s practice and the context of St Ives. The exhibition toured to the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness.
This exhibition represented a major opportunity to bring JMW Turner’s work to Cornwall for the first time and included some rarely seen private collection works from across Europe and America. Turner toured Cornwall and Devon in 1811, at an important stage in his artistic development. His omnivorous gaze took stock of the interplay between contemporary life and historic environments, putting the present into dialogue with the past. In doing so, he announced his arrival as a comprehensive witness of modern England. Including oil paintings, oil sketches, watercolours, pencil sketches and notebooks, the exhibition made it possible to see Turner’s creative development from observed reality to finished picture. Curated by Sam Smiles, expert on Turner’s work in the South West, the exhibition toured to Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery.
